Re: Oracle iFS

Tanel - I downloaded your presentation at RMOUG on LOB internals, good stuff. Thanks for putting it out there!

Gene

>>> tanel.poder.003_at_mail.ee 4/1/2004 10:34:27 AM >>>

Hi Ben!

Thans for posting this information, it seems very interesting. I'm gonna contact redhat for more information about the API, but I thought to ask you about Oracle's LOB performance in your environment.

How many concurrent users do you have using this system?
Are your BLOBs CACHE, NOCACHE or CACHE READS mode?
If this is stand-alone database for the doc-management system and the lobs are LOGGING, then how much redo does the system create?

I'm putting together an architecture for a huge database over 20TB in size, with about with about 100000 concurrent users. There are quite many challenges with LOBs, caching and logging - if you want to do write caching, you get huge logging, if you want nologging, then you can't do write caching etc..

We are using a document management API from Redhat. Cost: $0.00. It's open source.

You can deploy Oracle Text with it to get full text searching, although we have not done this. Versioning is supported, as is a drilldown structure.

The application is java, J2EE compliant. We run it via WebSphere. Files are stored as BLOB within Oracle. We are at 380 GB worth of BLOBs at present. Meta data, TEMP and UNDO drive total database size up to 440 GB. In our deployment, the developers tell me we use the API to handle the the versioning, checkin/checkout and other behind the scenes stuff. The GUI in our deployment is all built by our developers.

Tricky part is where this API fits into Redhat's marketing approach. They publicize on their website something called Content Management server, which is a bit different.

To find out more about the API, you will want to contact Redhat directly, because it seems hidden from view on the website. This API came from ArsDigita, a company that RedHat bought. The one place you can read a little about the API framework is http://ccm.redhat.com. But it makes no specific mention of document management.

My IFS experience is also from 3 years ago, on one of the first public IFS versions.

We could handle the weekly restarts because of some memory leaks, but when a virus hit our internal network, it started crawling and modifying all the files it saw in any mapped drives of workstations, overloading IFS.
IFS couldn't handle it anymore, eventually we couldn't start up the SMB cartridge anymore, we hacked our files out using ftp cartridge, copied them on a regular file server and haven't touched IFS ever since.

It might be a decent product now, thouch (is it still written in Java?)

Just asking for experiences using iFS, now called "Oracle Content Management SDK".

I'm casting about for ideas to manage IT documents. The three things that I see as
being necessary are these:

Ability to easily organize a structure that can be easily drilled down into.
ie. much like a directory structure

Full text indexing

Versioning - date and time of last edit, who edited the doc, and what changed.

Microsoft Indexing service is a no-brainer for 1 and 2, but I don't believe it does #3.

iFS seems a likely candidate, though I'm not sure how well it does #3.

Then there are commercial document management systems. Way too expensive
and complex.

There are alternatives such as KnowledgeTree (open source) but probably just
as much work to setup as Oracle iFS.

Any good experiences out there with iFS for this type of usage?

TIA
Jared

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